Tag Archives: recipes

Cake in the Pan #flashfiction

This week at the Carrot Ranch, Charli Mills challenged writers to In 99 words (no more, no less), write a story about the cooking show. It can be any cooking show, real or imagined. Who is there? What happens? Make it fun or follow a disaster. Go where the prompt leads!

This is my response. I hope you like it.

Cake in the Pan

Deidre laughed, sang and clapped on cue at her first-ever real live Christmas pantomime, until … the clowns prepared the cake. Deidre knew how to make cakes — she’d made them with her mum. The clowns obviously didn’t — tipping more flour over each other than into the pan, splashing the milk, and cracking in eggs, shells and all. The audience roared as the clowns placed a lid on the pan, shook it vigorously, then tipped out a magnificent cake. When offered a slice, Deidre folded her arms and clamped her lips. A cake made like that could never taste good.

👩‍🍳

This story is inspired by a true event. However, the only thing I remember is being horrified at the way the clowns put everything into the pan, including the egg shells, and turned out a cake. In writing, I tried to get back to what an expanded memory may have included. I hope it has worked.

The thought of being horrified at everything going into the pan in which the cake is to be cooked is now quite funny, as I know there are quite a few recipes made that way; including one of my favourites to make with children. If I was to ever be in a cooking show, this is what I’d make. And there’s not even an egg in sight.

Moon Cake

Ingredients

1 1/2 cups plain flour

1/2 cup sugar

1/2 cup brown sugar

4 tablespoons cocoa powder

5 tablespoons butter, melted

1 teaspoon vanilla

1 teaspoon bi-carbonate of soda (baking soda)

1 tablespoon white vinegar

1 cup milk

2/3 cup miniature marshmallows

Utensils

A cake pan

A cup measure

A mixing spoon

A tablespoon

A teaspoon

Method

1. Preheat the oven to 180° (350⁰F, Gas mark #4)

2. Put the flour, sugars, salt and cocoa in the cake pan. Mix them carefully. You will have the light brown moon sand.

3. Use the mixing spoon to make a big crater in the middle so the bottom of the pan shows through. Make another medium-sized crater and a little crater.

4. Put the baking soda in the medium-sized crater.

5. Pour the melted butter into the big crater.

6. Pour the vanilla into the little crater.

7. Pour the vinegar onto the bi-carb soda in the medium-sized crater. Watch it become a bubbling, foaming volcano.

8. When the volcano stops foaming, pour the milk over the moon sand and carefully mix it all together until it looks like smooth moon mud.

9. Scatter marshmallow rocks over the surface.

10. Bake it for around 35 minutes, or until a toothpick stuck in the centre comes out dry. Let the cake cool in the pan.

This recipe is available in different formats on my website readilearn and there are also some suggestions for science discussions while making the cake.

Enjoy a slice!

Thank you for reading. I appreciate your feedback. Please share your thoughts.

Fruit, Vegetables and Food for Thought — Science Week – #readilearn

12 Replies

Next week, from 14 – 22 August, is National Science Week in Australia. The theme for this year is Food: Different by Design which fits perfectly with this year being the International Year of Fruit and Vegetables.

Focus on fruits and Vegetables

Here is a wonderful video promoting fruits and vegetables for the International Year.

The video is fun to watch and makes my mouth water with all the bright and colourful photographs of delicious fruits and vegetables. If you watch the video with your students, it may lead to many and varied follow-up discussions and activities. Here are just a few suggestions.

Discussions

What fruits and vegetables can you name?

Which of them are fruits and which are vegetables?

What is the difference between fruit and vegetables?

Which of these fruits and vegetables have you tried?

Which is/are your favourites?

Is your favourite included in the video?

What is your favourite way to eat these fruits and vegetables?

Activities

Extend vocabulary — make a list describing the fruits and vegetables and what children like about them; for example: sweet, juicy, crunchy, soft, ripe, nutritious, delicious, raw, cooked, bitter, exotic.

Have children draw or write about their favourite fruit or vegetable treat.

Set up a fruit and vegetable market in the classroom using laminated children’s drawings or images cut from magazines; plastic, wooden or paper mache fruit and vegetables, and use it for a variety of activities including sorting and shopping.

Food

Make a fruit salad or fruit kebabs. Invite every child to contribute a piece of fruit. Share it for brain break or morning tea.

Make vegetable soup. Invite children to contribute a vegetable. Serve it with bread or savoury scones, which you could also make, for lunch.

These readilearn resources provide suggestions for other lunch ideas that are easily prepared at school.

How to make a healthy smiley face sandwich is a procedural text with step-by-step instructions that are easy enough for children to follow on their own with the supervision of an adult in a small group. The activity is suitable for use in literacy groups. It could be incorporated into a unit focusing on healthy eating.

Continue reading: Fruit, Vegetables and Food for Thought — Science Week – readilearn

Can I help?

19 Replies

I have written a few posts recently about requesting help and the difficulty many of us experience in doing so. It’s a topic that is oft repeated. Not only do many have difficulty in asking for help, we are often unsure about when to offer help, how to help, and whether any assistance will be beneficial.

In a comment on one of those posts Anne Goodwin, who blogs at Annecdotal, said that the way our first cries for help are responded to in infancy influences our attitudes to asking for help later in life. I suggest that the way we are responded to when offering to help in those early years also influences our attitudes later.

In an earlier post entitled Lending a helping hand, I asserted that

“Little ones love to help and hate to be helped in almost equal measure. “Let me do it!” and “I can do it myself!” are two frequently heard phrases in households with little ones. Opportunities for both are essential for their developing sense of self, independence and confidence. Both require a great deal of patience on the part of parents and a larger allocation of time than one would normally feel necessary.”

Sometimes, when young children ask, “Can I help?”, parents are reluctant to involve them because of the additional time required, and often the extra effort it takes to clean up the mess that may also be created. However, I recommend that the time and energy expended are more than compensated for by the benefits to the parent-child relationship, as well as to the child’s development of knowledge and skills.

Just as time to play together and read together is factored into the family routine, it is important to set aside time for tasks such as cooking and cleaning that help to develop independence and life skills.

With cleaning, as with other tasks, it is important to provide guidance and encouragement, and to accept the result. Don’t expect the child’s efforts to match yours. You can always finish off the task later, if you must, when the child is out of sight. Expecting too high a standard or being too critical will discourage a child’s willingness to try again.

As at home, in the classroom children can take responsibility for cleaning up after themselves and working together to keep the room organised and tidy on a daily basis. It may take a little longer to establish good habits initially, but the benefits are reaped throughout the year.

When I was in the classroom I provided children with a number of strategies to help them develop organisation skills.

At the beginning of the year I showed them how to organise their belongings in their tidy trays so that they could easily find what they were looking for. I made a photo display to provide visual as well as verbal reminders.
Throughout the day I would play music or transition games to help them move from one activity to another, and to indicate how much time remained until they were to be ready for the next activity.
We had a wonderful programme called You Can Do it! which helped children develop personal and social skills, one of which is organisation. We had a great set of songs to support development of the skills. At the end of each day when it was time to pack up, I would play the organisation song. The children would happily sing along and have the room neat and tidy and themselves ready for home by the time the song ended.

These simple strategies helped the day run smoothly and required a minimum of instructions and reminders.

Cooking, or more specifically food preparation not necessarily requiring heat, in the classroom requires additional planning which will be influenced by the facilities and support available. Whenever possible I organised cooking experiences for small groups with the assistance of an aide or parent volunteer. This gave children more opportunities for discussion and involvement.

I always organised for the healthy smiley face sandwich to be made in small groups.

Cutting up fruit and making fruit kebabs is suitable for small groups too. Children can be asked to bring in a serve of fruit to contribute to the choices. We used to have a daily mid-morning fruit snack so it did not require any extra effort on the part of parents, just scheduling on my part.

One of my favourite cakes to cook with children is a moon cake. It is both fun to make and delicious to eat, and provides many opportunities for discussion. It is just as suitable for making in the classroom as it is for home. I have prepared a guided recipe which will be available on my readilearn website.

I recently made the recipe with my grandchildren. They were eager to help and took turns to add and mix the ingredients. There are sufficient things to do to give everyone in a small group an opportunity of being involved. However, it is also suitable to do with the whole class observing while individual children do different tasks.

Making the cake provides great opportunities for observing, turn taking, vocabulary development, curiosity, and development of science knowledge. All of these contribute to life skills and experiences. And then there’s the treat at the end!

Although involving children in tasks like cooking and cleaning at home or at school involves extra organisation and time, it is well worth it for the long-term, as well as immediate, benefits.

Do you have any recollections of helping with tasks at home or at school? How did you feel about it? How has it influenced your current attitudes?

Thank you

Thank you for reading. I appreciate your feedback. Please share your thoughts.

Recipes for the classroom

32 Replies

As completion, and therefore launch, of readilearn, my website of early childhood teaching resources approaches, it has become obvious that some categories are less well-resourced than others.

I consider food preparation to be a great way of involving children in learning that is fun, purposeful, integrates curriculum areas, and develops skills that can be applied in everyday life. I have previously written about learning in the kitchen with suggestions for parents at home.

In the introduction to the readilearn cooking resources I write

Cooking, including food preparation that doesn’t include any heating, is a great way to teach life skills and integrate learning in a meaningful and enjoyable way across curriculum areas. When children are involved in food preparation they may be developing:

Social skills of cooperation, turn taking, sharing, patience

Literacy skills – reading and following the recipe, selecting ingredients, writing a menu and invitations, writing a recount, writing a shopping list

Mathematics – counting e.g. the number of eggs, measuring with spoons and cups, measuring time, sharing (e.g. the number of cookies, how many slices to make)

Science – mixing, adding or removing heat

Safety – with knives, peelers and hot implements and ingredients

Social Studies: Culture – when preparing ethnic food

readilearn materials are designed to engage children in activities that are both fun and purposeful, with opportunities for learning across the curriculum in a meaningful context.

I was disappointed to realise that I had only one cooking resource prepared: How to make a healthy smiley face sandwich

A remedy was required and I tried to think of other resources I could add.

I have previously made ladybird biscuits by icing an Arrowroot biscuit and adding Smarties for spots. I will probably add that recipe in the future, but I was trying to think of something healthier to begin with. I wondered if it might be possible to make a ladybird from an apple. This is what I did:

When I made one for my grandson on the weekend, I was pleased that he recognised it as a ladybird beetle, even without the spots!

Unfortunately, it’s more suitable for an adult to make for a child than for children to make for themselves. Apples are too difficult for young children to cut. It is therefore not suitable for readilearn. However, I had fun making it and will continue to think of other recipes I can add to readilearn’s cooking collection.

Thank you

Thank you for reading. I appreciate your feedback. Please share your thoughts.

I’m learnerate and loving it!

9 Replies

In my previous post I can do this – one step at a time! I shared two words that I had just learned: illearnerate and learnacy*. I was excited by the power of their meaning and proudly declared myself to be learnerate.

But it wasn’t always that way. Like the students Guy Claxton described in his article Learning to learn: a key goal in a 21^st century curriculum, I had been schooled to be illearnerate. Over time, with the opportunity to take control of my learning and follow my interests, I developed a passion for learning, especially learning about learning, and became learnerate. Enthusing others about learning has been a life-long ambition and journey.

Included in that post were two videos in which I demonstrated ways I use PowerPoint. I found out immediately after publishing that the ways I demonstrated weren’t the most efficient. I am grateful to Bec for informing me of a better way of saving PowerPoint slides as images; and also for the consideration she showed by informing me away from my blog in order to reduce the chances of my feeling embarrassment about having my “primitive” method pointed out (my words, not hers).

Bec’s consideration for my feelings as a learner was in great contrast to school experiences in which humiliation and ridicule seemed the preferred way of dealing with any inadequacy, real or imagined. Whenever a lack of knowledge or skill was revealed, rather than being perceived as an opportunity for learning, it was seen as an opportunity to be singled out, chastised and embarrassed in front of as many others as possible.

One particular instance stands out in my memory. I was in year eight. History tests had been marked and handed back; all except mine. I tentatively raised my hand and told the teacher. Wrong move. The teacher made a big show of looking for my paper, finally “finding” it in a stack of papers on the desk and announcing to the class that it had been set aside as it was such poor work and I should be thoroughly ashamed of myself.

Over the years I have come to realise that there is no shame in not knowing, or not being able to do something. It simply indicates an opportunity for learning. It is rare that someone will intentionally do less than the best they know how. If there is a better way, they need to be shown. Thank you, Bec, for showing me.

My intention for this post was, and still is, to share my recipe for Pinwheel sandwiches. At the time of making the videos used in the previous post, I had already made the PowerPoint but had not made each slide into an image for uploading to my blog. How lucky was I that Bec told me a much more efficient way before I had done so! Instead of saving as a PDF, and then snipping and saving an image of each individual slide as I had demonstrated, all I had to do was click “Save As” and select “PNG” as the file type and every slide was saved as an individual image. Simple: very quick and easy, as I demonstrate in this 90 second video!

And now for my pinwheel sandwiches. They also are simple, very quick and easy; very popular and just as tasty as they look!

*Think of the terms illiterate and literacy and apply them to learning and you will have a good idea of the meaning.

Thank you for reading. I appreciate your feedback. Please share your thoughts about any aspect of this post.

Learning in the kitchen

18 Replies

The kitchen is a great place for learning.

When children participate in the preparation and cleaning up of meals and other food items the learning is richer than just cooking and cleaning, they are learning skills which will be invaluable for their future independent lives such as:

cooperation, sharing, taking turns and patience (how long before they’ll be ready?)
the etiquette of dining.
hygienic food handling.
the language of food and cooking and the preciseness of vocabulary such as the difference between dice and chop, shred and slice, boil and steam, bake and roast.
counting and one to one matching when setting the table with one of each item for each person.
the mathematics of measuring mass (250 g), volume (1 cup or 250 ml) and time (bake for 15 minutes).
the mathematics of linear measurement; measuring the length, width and depth of baking tins and trays.
reading and following procedures, and understanding that unless the steps of a recipe are followed in order the outcome may not be what was expected.
writing of menus and shopping lists.
organisational and preparation skills: making sure all ingredients and utensils are available and assembled.
the science of mixing and combining, heating and cooling, and the different effects these may have upon different ingredients and utensils.
understanding that some of the changes that occur are reversible e.g. water to ice and back again; but that some are irreversible e.g. cream to butter, but not back again.

While it is not suitable for children to use knives or handle hot utensils or heating appliances when young, and only under careful adult supervision when older, children can be included in many kitchen tasks from a young age.

Watching, discussing and asking questions provide great opportunities for learning. Children can be introduced to tasks such as mixing, pouring, measuring, menu planning and cleaning up, amongst others, as they grow.

One of the fantastic things about food preparation is the opportunity it provides for asking questions: it can be an ongoing edible science experiment, for example:

Why do the cakes rise?

What makes the water bubble?

Why is a cloud coming out of the jug?

Where does the water go when it boils?

Why isn’t the egg white white before it’s cooked?

What would happen if I didn’t put the egg in the cake mixture?

Why is some sugar brown?

What the difference between sugar, caster sugar and brown sugar?

What happens to cream when it is beaten?

At the moment I am grappling with a kitchen science dilemma, and if you can provide an answer to my question, I’d be very appreciative.

My question is:

What is a suitable vegetarian substitute for gelatine?

One of my family’s favourite desserts is Mango Cream Tart. Gelatine is used as a setting agent in the dessert.

Some of my family members are vegetarians who, upon discovering the answer to the seemingly innocuous question

What is gelatine made from?

realised that eating anything containing gelatine no longer suited their food choices.

So rather than remove the dessert from family menus, or make something that was unacceptable to these family members, I decided the only thing to do was find a substitute for the offending ingredient.

I have purchased two different vegetarian substitutes but both require being boiled in the liquid which they are to set and are therefore unsuited to the Mango Cream Tart and other cream cheese cheesecakes I may wish to make. An additional factor confirming their lack of suitability is the warning that they may not set some fruit juices.

I did an online search and found 3 Vegetarian Substitutes for gelatine. If you have used with success any these products, or another product, that may be suitable to use in my Mango Cream Tart recipe I would love to know please.

Here is the recipe which includes suggestions for parents on how they can incorporate learning opportunities for their children while making it. If you can’t help solve my gelatine dilemma, I’d love to know what you think of the way I have presented the recipe. Would this format be useful to parents of young children?

You can click on this link: Mango cream tart – recipe for a full-screen slideshow of the recipe.

The quote by Michael Rosen at the top of this post is from his new book: Good Ideas How to Be Your Child’s (and Your Own) Best Teacher. In the book he includes a chapter “The Kitchen” explaining why he thinks the kitchen is the best classroom invented.

Thank you for reading. I appreciate your feedback. Please share your thoughts about any aspect of this post. I’d especially appreciate feedback on my presentation of the recipe and suggestions for a vegetarian substitute for gelatine.

Kitchen photo credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/john-schilling/364481975/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/2.0/

	Norah on A Secret for Two #99WordS…
	Two Can Keep a Secre… on A Secret for Two #99WordS…
	calmkate on Race into Reading with Nationa…
	roughwighting on A Secret for Two #99WordS…
	D. Avery @shiftnshak… on A Secret for Two #99WordS…

Norah Colvin

Live Love Laugh Learn . . . Create the possibilities

Tag Archives: recipes

Cake in the Pan #flashfiction